Polly is fucking with the blinds while you sit on the couch. She wants to get the lighting right while you work on a project. You open your laptop as the room is illuminated with this diffuse, neutral glow. She turns a lamp on and moves it around, which is really distracting. You’ve learned to just let her get on with it and that she’ll start sketching at some point. It’s not like you’re writing yet anyway – just staring at the words you’ve already written, waiting for more to come.

You focus on the words. It’s only ever the words. You don’t have aphantasia but you don’t start with a mental image. You let it fade from your mind. It’s only the words to which you pay attention. It’s not even how they sound; it’s how they read. Polly scratches away at her notebook: the sound of sharp pencil on rough paper. You don’t know how she reduces you into your constituent lines even while you can see her do it. Your nose appears. The collar of your dirty shirt now too.

You try. You turn back to your laptop. You stare at the words you’ve already written. You wait for more to come.

You realise you are writing and you stop. It’s an awkward trick. You explained it once to Polly as being like the kid in Mystery Men who can only turn invisible when no one is looking. She said she hadn’t seen Mystery Men. You figure she got the point though, that when writing happens everything else fades away, even the act of the writing itself. Feelings bypass thought to become words straight on the page. The sense you have of the story projects itself onto your computer screen. All the notes you make when you’re not writing help you focus that sense – actually build something coherent from it – but the writing itself is spontaneous.

Again, you have explained to Polly the dialectic here: the synthesis of improvisation and your script. She asked you to stop using that word. She said she should never have taught it to you. You laughed. You keep using it cause it makes you laugh. Some day Polly is going to be fed up with all your bullshit and all you will have left of her is words you find funny for reasons inexplicable to anyone else. It’s difficult being in a relationship that you know will end some day, especially when you have a glimmer of how. All the unavoidable arguments that are little now, all this shit about the heating and water collecting by the side of the bath, all the moments where she sounds exasperated at you responding to her being serious by being silly: it’s growing like a tumour. You already know it’s malignant.

You characterise this relational difficulty as like writing a story. This isn’t something you’ve talked to Polly about. This characterisation is for you alone – until it comes out in your own writing as these types of feelings always do. In writing a story, you bring a friend to life through sheer force of will, and you do this knowing how badly you are going to treat them, knowing that you are going to have to say goodbye in less than ideal circumstances. You know they will hate you for it, but you have to be their friend nonetheless. The story has to happen for them to be real at all.

Polly has accused you of being the main character. You’ve shot back that it doesn’t help when she draws you like the main character. She laughs, usually. Sometimes when she’s really, really upset, she’ll scribble you out. It’s unclear to you what exactly she means by that.

You realise you are writing again, and you stop. There are pages of it now. Well, not pages per se, but what will become pages if this ever is printed. You never know, while you’re writing, what’s going to make it. Every sentence worth replacing was worth writing in the first place. You tell yourself that when you make yourself edit. But for now you stare at your work, however much you wrote in however long it’s been. It’s nice that it was there at all.

Polly has stopped. You look at her and she’s smiling in that way that she smiles when she’s watching you work. She must have stopped some time ago. You notice the diffuse light through the windows is gone. The lamp illuminates the sketchbook that’s thrust into your hands. Polly grins.

It’s you, bored, surrounded by bodies. Polly has drawn loose with the lines of your companions. They bleed into each other. Arms to legs to feet to hands to hair to heads. Except you, bored, sat in the centre. It’s affecting. The feeling is of a disconnect, which makes it hard to describe. Polly always wants you to describe the way it makes you feel so you think harder. It reminds you of an orgy.

Ah. Right. This was an orgy you attended. You were bored. You had been pushed into the centre of the mats and you were caressing the people around you but you had been distracted. There was a minute where you sat still, thoughts faded fully, body left as a receptacle for the sounds and smells and sight of it all. It wasn’t that the orgy had been overwhelming, you just weren’t into the people. Maybe you would have been into the people if they had all been wearing clothes and you got a sense of their style, or if there had been some foreplay from which the orgy was teased out, as if it might not happen at all. You were instead left in the centre, no tension to hold your desire in place. You didn’t realise Polly had been watching. You didn’t realise she thought that was worth recording.

That’s the difference, really. She sees herself as a witness. It’s not so much that she brings someone to life in her drawing; it’s that she flattens someone into a static experience. The drawing almost changes shape in your hands. The lines that had once been so evocative all point to this single moment of a woman, you, bored at an orgy. The you in the page is bored while an orgy goes on around her. That’s all there is. And Polly draws beautifully but that’s all you see: what she saw. You can’t live within the pencil scratchings on this page the same way you create spaces between the sentences for a reader to inhabit. There’s only an event, chronicled through her perspective. There’s only you, bored, looking kinda dumpy with your shirt on at an orgy. It had been cold, in your defence.

Polly is still smiling at you, waiting for you to say something.

You realise you are breaking up over a drawing, and you stop.